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We hope you enjoy this episode: Black Buddhists and Healing the Traumas of Racism.

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American pop culture rarely showcases Hindu death and funeral rituals. One notable exception is the 2006 film The Namesake, based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. When the main character, Gogol, learns of his father’s death, he immediately shaves his head, as is customary for upper-caste Hindu males. He then visits his family home in New York where relatives and friends have gathered to pray and perform funerary rites. Gogol’s white girlfriend, Maxine, joins him and stumbles in her efforts to console Gogol, first by wearing an all-black outfit when everyone else is dressed in white, a color for mourning in Hindu traditions, and second by inviting herself to scatter his father’s ashes in India, a rite usually performed by the immediate family. Through Maxine, viewers witness a stereotypical white American who knows almost nothing about Hindu customs related to death and mourning. Sadly, American journalists writing about pandemic-related deaths in India have demonstrated similarly inadequate knowledge about Hindu death rituals.

In April 2021, at the height of the pandemic in India, news articles such as “Complacency and Missteps Deepen a Virus Disaster in India,” and “How Did the Covid-19 Outbreak in India get so bad?” published in The New York Times and The Washington Post cited large public gatherings, population density, government missteps, and developing-world healthcare infrastructure as reasons for India’s Covid-19 problems. Writing for the New York Times, foreign correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman worried for the safety of himself, his family, and his neighbors, as hundreds of thousands contracted Covid-19 and overwhelmed India’s healthcare system. He writes, “As a foreign correspondent for nearly 20 years, I’ve covered combat zones, been kidnapped in Iraq, and been thrown in jail in more than a few places. This is unsettling in a different way. There’s no way of knowing if my two kids, wife, or I will be among those who get a mild case and bounce back to good health, or if we will get really sick. And if we do get really sick, where will we go? ICUs are full. Gates to so many hospitals are closed.” His stories offer readers in the United States a glimpse of the pain and anguish that he experienced in India at the height of Covid-19, fears shared by many Indians throughout the country. Reporters Shefali Anand and Suryatapa Bhattacharya, writing for The Wall Street Journal, explain how young adults, such as Anisha Saigal, 29, “stood in line for 3 ½ hours at Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi to get a consultation” before being admitted to the pediatric ward since beds were not available. Others, like Priyanka Kumari, 25, who live in small towns where healthcare facilities are far more limited often died before reaching hospitals with ventilators and medicine.

Alongside these accounts, some news media outlets furthered, albeit tacitly, colonial stereotypes of the region, mostly through a poor understanding of India’s religious traditions. Too often, journalists failed to provide their primarily white, Christian, American audiences with information to understand why Hindus engage in particular death rituals and why others within India have different customs.

Over the past several months, I reviewed 103 articles in American newspapers about Covid-19 in India. Only a few explained the significance of religious rites, and they did so briefly. Most, including the examples below, focused instead on descriptions of mass death and mass cremations.

Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman describes cremation grounds vividly: “Crematories are so full of bodies it’s as if a war just happened. Fires burn around the clock. Many places are holding mass cremations, dozens at a time, and at night, in certain areas of New Delhi, the sky glows.” He compares cremation grounds to war zones, often characterized by uncertainty, fear, and disorder, while commenting on the jarring sight of mass cremations occurring throughout the night. The images accompanying these articles depict bodies being prepared for, or undergoing, cremation rites.

(Image source: Atul Loke for the New York Times)

A predominantly white Christian audience that recognizes burial as the most appropriate means of handling the deceased may perceive these open-air mass cremations as undignified if they are unaware why Hindus cremate. Without such an explanation of the history, readers are likely to perceive the practice as foreign and mysterious, especially since open-air cremations are illegal in most places in the United States.

Of the few articles that did explain cremation rites in India, most provided only a cursory overview of the Hindu custom. One New York Times article declares, “Cremations are an important part of Hindu burial rituals, seen as a way to free the soul from the body. Those working at the burning ground said that they were utterly exhausted and could never remember so many people dying in such a short span of time.” The article features visuals of cremations and describes Hindu funerary rites as burials. This claim conflates burial and cremation, elides the region’s religious diversity and reasons for cremation, and echoes colonial sentiments and misunderstandings.

White colonists in India have long depicted Hindu cremation as a barbaric practice. Alexander Duff (1806-1878), the first missionary in India from the Church of Scotland, described Hindu cremation as a disgusting spectacle. In one of his most popular books, India and Its Missions: Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism in Theory and Practice (1839), he writes, “In the sacred books [for Hindus] it is required that the body be burnt to ashes on the funeral pile [pyre] – the process being accompanied by various religious ceremonies. The consecrated places for burning the dead are usually at the ghats, or flights of steps at the landing places on the margin of a river. These ghats at all times present spectacles the most disgusting to every feeling mind.” For Duff and his contemporaries, public cremation was an uncivilized religious ritual that did not offer the same dignity as that of the Christian burial.

Duff was not alone in portraying Hindu cremation as primitive. In Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition, scholar David Arnold highlights how European colonial officials abhorred cremations, seeing them as repugnant rituals. They denounced cremation and other Hindu traditions to justify British rule for the supposedly uncivilized masses and to present conversion to Christianity as Hindus’ only hope for redemption.

Most Hindus are cremated when they die. Exceptions include babies under the age of two, renunciants (sannyāsīs), and some members of lower social groups such as Dalits, who are buried. Cremation occurs soon after death, often within 24 to 48 hours, and severs any remaining ties or lingering sense of attachment that the self (ātman) may have to the body. The body is prepared for cremation rites by the deceased’s relatives, who ceremonially bathe and clothe the body, anoint the forehead with vermilion marks, and offer flowers, often while reciting devotional verses and songs. Relatives pay their respects to the deceased by garlanding, bowing down to, and circumambulating the body, which are ways of showing reverence in Hindu traditions. The deceased’s eldest son or a close relative ignites the funeral pyre at the cremation grounds. The ashes of the body are collected and ritually dispersed in a body of water. In the United States, Hindus have had to modify these customs because of laws that prohibit public cremations. Instead, Hindus in America conduct their funerary rites in a closed chamber at a local funeral home before the body is taken to a crematorium.

(Image source: Getty Images)

These rituals stem from Hindu beliefs that the immortal and imperishable self (ātman) takes on a body and undergoes a process of reincarnation (punarjanma) until attaining liberation (moksa). The cremation rituals and dispersal of ashes symbolize the body’s return to the natural elements and represent the cyclicality of life.

Many other religious groups in India, including Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs also cremate the deceased. By labeling all cremation rites as “Hindu,” reporters erase the country’s religious diversity and fail to respect the dead. This erasure echoes eighteenth-century British colonialists, who often used the term “Hindoo” to refer to everyone on the Indian subcontinent who identified as neither Muslim nor Christian.

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While readers in the United States would find reports of cardboard coffins in Ecuador or mass graves at Hart Island, NY, shocking, they still have the cultural and religious literacy to understand burials. When the same readers were presented with raw footage of open-air cremations in India where bodies were burned around the clock in 2021, they may have concluded, as the colonialists did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that Hindus treat the deceased in an inhumane way. The repeated references to and images of cremation in news media exoticize funeral practices and cement differences between the “East” and the “West.” These differences tacitly perpetuate colonial legacies that characterize the “East” as mysterious and backward and the “West” as its opposite – civilized and progressive. Part of mitigating this distance – cultivating understanding and mutual respect for people of different cultures, traditions, backgrounds, and races – requires greater religious literacy.

A Pew Research Study on “What Americans Know About Religion” conducted in 2019 reveals that most residents of the United States have background knowledge on Christianity and the Bible, and some understanding of the meaning of key terms in Islam, such as Ramadan and Mecca. Far fewer Americans, however, could answer basic questions on Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. The absence of general literacy on religious minorities in the United States gives journalists the added responsibility of coupling reporting on the what with the why, that is, describing current events as they unfold while also providing readers with the tools to understand those events.

The cultivation and communication of religious literacy – that is, the histories, beliefs, and practices of religious traditions – ought to be paired with an examination of colonial legacies and how they shape contemporary attitudes towards race and religion in the United States. As scholars like Tomoko Masuzawa and Kathryn Gin Lum have shown, classifications of religion, including the labeling of some as “primitive” and others as “ethical,” emerged during the age of European colonialism and continued through the expansion of the United States’ empire. Such taxonomies were political acts that hierarchized religions purportedly rooted in rationality like Protestant Christianity and deemed others that included the worship of objects as primitive. By understanding this history and its legacies in the United States, journalists and readers will become aware of the unchecked and often subtle ways that colonial thought patterns pervade one’s conception of the self and other.

Bhakti Mamtora is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Wooster and a Sacred Writes/Revealer writing fellow. Her research examines orality, textuality, and canonization in South Asian and diasporic Hindu traditions.

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post Problems with How Journalists Write about Hindu Death Rituals appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Stocksy United)

The following excerpt comes from Rima Vesely-Flad’s book Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation, published by NYU Press. The book explores how Black Buddhists in the United States have used Buddhist teachings to deal with living in a white supremacist society.

This excerpt comes from the book’s fifth chapter. The section explores how Black Buddhists have interpreted the Buddhist concepts of “self” and “non-self” to find psychological and spiritual liberation within a deeply racist world.

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Blackness, Self, and Non-Self

Rather than thinking of non-self as a destination or ultimate truth, Sebene Selassie says, we need to be able to relate to the reality of the self and the truth of non-self at the same time.

“The Buddha was asked if there is a self or non-self. He wouldn’t answer because he said ‘that’s not the right question.’ He pointed to the functional need for connecting or relating to the self. It’s not like he walked around and didn’t refer to himself or didn’t have reference for others. He said those are necessary designations we need to move through the world. There is self, but there’s also non-self. . . . He wasn’t saying that non-self is someplace we have to get to and then we can let go of self. He was pointing out that we must develop an understanding of non-self, this is a mark of existence too, in the same way that suffering is a mark of existence. But he also said that there’s freedom from suffering.”

In connecting and relating to the self, the body is a conduit for liberation. At the same time, Lama Rod Owens, a teacher in the Kagyu Tibetan tradition, relates the metaphysical understanding of self to political, psychological, and spiritual liberation:

“In Buddhism, enlightenment isn’t the extinguishing of the self. It is the recognition of the self. It’s the recognition of the illusion of self. If we did not relate to the self, to this sense of ego, then we wouldn’t be able to be in a relationship to people around us. Because everyone in the world communicates through ego. We relate to reality through ego. So if I were to obtain enlightenment—and I hope to at some point—but if I were to obtain enlightenment, I would still be very connected to ego, especially if I’m trying to liberate others from this reality. So it’s not the ego, it’s not the self that is the issue. It’s our relationship [to those ideas]. . . . Our relationship gives meaning to things around us. The thing itself doesn’t have meaning. This kind of basic work that I’m always engaged in is this balance between self and non-self, and how that relates to social liberation, and how social liberation ties into ultimate liberation.”

For Owens, as well as other Black Buddhist teachers, mindfulness of the body is an essential aspect of liberatory practice. Pamela Ayo Yetunde states,

“In the practices of mindfulness of the body, there’s never [a teaching of] ‘be mindful of the capital S self.’ . . . So [for some] it somehow has become this interpretation or teaching that the body doesn’t exist. But I don’t believe that’s the teaching because there’s so much focus on mindfulness of the body. Those two truths can’t coexist with all the focus on meditation and mindfulness of the body—when to eat, how to sit, so I don’t believe that no-self means no body. And I think that is destructive teaching actually.

The way that I look at it now is that no self means ‘try not to become a narcissist.’ . . . Don’t be so focused on ego clinging that you become selfish. When we look at the teachings of the Brahmaviharas on compassion, equanimity, loving, kindness, and sympathetic joy, when you engage in those practices deeply, it makes you selfless; it cultivates selflessness, and so that’s really how I see no-self. It means selflessness . . . attention towards the well-being of others.”

The fact of constant change—impermanence—of all phenomena, including the self, illuminates that racial constructs of the Black body are empty of substantial meaning. In short, to embrace the teaching on non-self is to recognize that degrading interpretations of Blackness are superficial labels, rooted in ignorance, that historically were exploited for expedient purposes such as land theft and colonization, slavery and forced servitude, and constructing whiteness as intellectually and morally superior to Blackness. In the teaching on non-self, the artificiality of constructed realities is starkly illuminated. To deconstruct the self, not only as a series of always changing and shifting aggregates, but also as a set of degraded images originating from a deluded white supremacist mind, allows practitioners to claim the freedom inherent in dharma teachings. Constructs are simply constructs. They have no basis in reality; nor are they liberating. These constructs form part of the causes and conditions of suffering, but are not hard and fixed facts, eternally believed and internalized. Thus, Black practitioners can shift interpretations of their constructed selves in the movement toward their liberation.

Ruth King, a teacher in the Insight tradition, embraces the teachings on anatta as liberating for people of African descent:

“The teachings on anatta—non-self—are an important inquiry for people of color—those of us who’ve [had] their sense of self ripped away from them or haven’t had a chance to shine or be inwardly affirmed in a meaningful way. We question and doubt ourselves. We don’t know if we do this because of race or if it’s just the human condition.

Self and non-self are wrapped around the Buddhist teaching on ultimate and relative reality. In brief, you need a self (relative reality) to know that you’re not a self or to know you are liberated (ultimate reality). In other words, you need the body in order to wake up.

In the Buddhist teachings, non-self is not that you are not a self, it’s that you’re not a self that you can solidly rely on. The self is constantly changing—a series of processes or aggregate experiences. Change is all there is. When we understand this from our practice, we can soften the grip that identity hardens in our hearts and minds. We can know a deeper freedom, despite conditioning, from the inside out.”

For Black teachers with long-term practices, personally relating to dharma teachings can illuminate obscure or potentially threatening passages, especially in a society in which Black people have been dehumanized. Kate Johnson, a teacher in the Insight tradition, says,

“What are the deep kind of awakening experiences that we’ve had, and do we or do we not teach from that place? Some of my most profound experiences in meditation around this [teaching on anatta] have been deep experiences and insights into emptiness and selflessness, and the interdependent, not solid, nature of self. And also the fact [that there is] no central command system for that self, that the mind actually is not that. I don’t usually teach that. When I can, my favorite places to teach are within POC [communities], the community of women, and queer communities—that’s what I love. And I feel like when I’m in mixed company or when I’m teaching to primarily white audiences I don’t often speak about selflessness or anatta because I worry that it’s going to be fuel for spiritual bypass.”

(Image source: Yuko Shimizu)

“Spiritual bypass” refers to using spiritual teachings to avoid psychological and social problems in one’s self or environment. For people of African descent, the challenge of relating to non-self is less about “spiritual bypass” and more about relating to language that suggests non-personhood. Denial of Black humanity undergirded laws and social practices during centuries of colonization and formation of the United States as a nation-state. Thus, the language of “non-self” can erect an emotional hurdle that is important to address with nuance. Unique Holland, a long-term practitioner in the Zen and Insight traditions, describes her first encounter with the teachings on non-self. “[We live in a society in which] white people are the norm. There’s a racialized class distinction. And so this idea of no self had all of this packaging . . . in a way that was distinct from the kinds of oppression and mask making that was expected of me outside of dharma spaces.” The “norms” to which Holland refers are the constructed norms of whiteness as superior and Blackness as degraded. The teaching on non-self, for practitioners such as Holland, has the potential to further reiterate degradation. Yet for Black Buddhist teachers, the liberation found in the teaching on non-self is akin to the liberation encountered in the Black Radical Tradition: it is possible to deconstruct the falsely constructed Black body and claim one’s (relative) self in positive, affirming ways. Moreover, in Buddhism, it is possible to affirm one’s Blackness as one—but not the only—stage in the process of spiritual, psychological, and political liberation. In the practice of letting thoughts fall away, and entering into meditative concentration, the falseness inherent in the mundane world fades to background noise, and the experience of mental stillness arises, even briefly, as the path to liberation. Thus, dharma practice can be seen as living into the aspirations of the Black Radical Tradition: practitioners who enter a realm of mental stability are no longer in reaction to white supremacist constructs and messages. Rather, they can see the delusions inherent in white supremacy and observe but do not react to the false constructs inherent within those delusions.

In their embrace of the teachings on non-self, furthermore, Buddhist practitioners of African descent elevate core teachings on interdependency or interbeing. In the Zen tradition, “non-self” is also interpreted as teachings on interrelationship. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition, writes on interrelationship in her meditation The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender. Manuel acknowledges the “profound interrelationship that sustains our existence” and states that “interrelationship is inherent to living.”

“No-self means that other people are involved. That’s what no-self means. It’s not just you. It should say not just yourself, rather than no-self. It means no-self in and of itself, like there’s nothing happening here. It’s relational, and that’s why I say there’s no-self, there’s no just you.

No-self has no substance. . . . And so, you have to talk about your life back to where you started from: how you’re living and who you are, so you can understand the suffering. You have to have some[one] to study. You can’t just walk around, go ‘there’s nobody and there’s nothing and there’s emptiness, and so I just sit here and breathe.’ How long will that last?

I think that no self is really important to understand, especially in Zen, and I talk a lot about it because they [other teachers] use it so much to negate the lived experience, but it’s saying it is the lived experience. No self is interrelationship. No self is interrelationship, it is interbeing.”

Manuel emphasizes that teachings on non-self give practitioners an opportunity to study their own lives: to look within and understand how they arrived at different experiences and identities. Rather than negating the experience of being human, the teaching on non-self is a teaching on learning from one’s lived experiences as well as how relate to other persons in an aware and interdependent way. Similarly, Chimyo Atkinson, a former resident monk at Great Tree Women’s Zen Center, states,

“To say non-self is kind of negative. [The phrase] is kind of empty because self in my understanding is greater than what we see as contained in this body or what we see is contained in this head. It includes all of your surroundings, everything, all the beings that you are ultimately connected with, because there’s the big self. The self that is included in all of this universe. We are not separate from anything. To say self is to separate from all myriad beings that are out there. And that’s our big delusion right there.”

Understanding the teaching of non-self in relation to the social world, Owens says, fosters deeper understanding of one’s own life—as real and in relationship, as a construct and an illusion, and in relation to ultimate reality:

“The ultimate truth is non-self. But the relative truth is self. So one of the things that at least in my practice and also throughout the dharma is that in order for me to earn my experience of the ultimate, I have to actually earn the experience of the relative. So I have to come really close and really solid into what my experience of having a self is. Because once I get really curious in this idea of self, I begin to understand how to actually undo the self, and undo my fixation on the self. I think the self is so deeply, deeply entwined in a way of being in the world and I have to actually understand the mechanisms of the self in order to transcend the self.

So I can start speaking in ways of very general non-self terms, but actually that’s going to be the root of increasing my suffering, of increasing my suffering on the relative, because I just don’t understand the self enough in order to move through it or to transcend it yet. But the ultimate is always on the horizon. So I can talk about the self, but I also know at the same time there is no self. This is the tricky part of integrating justice and dharma. Both of these ideas have to be held together. The relative and the ultimate. You can’t skip around to either-or. You have to be right with both of those always at the same time, and then that actually begins to help us move more towards the ultimate.”

Rima Vesely-Flad, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy and the Director of Peace and Justice Studies at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out our conversation with Rima Vesely-Flad in episode 24 of the Revealer podcast: “Black Buddhists and Healing the Traumas of Racism.”

The post Blackness, Self, and Non-Self in Buddhism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Muse)

This essay was produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Ideas podcast for their “Illuminations” series.

Unboxing

“If I’m ever going to have a spiritual unboxing experience, this will be it,” I joked to my wife last summer, gripping the pull tab of a white package that had arrived on our porch. Inside was the Muse S, a consumer-grade brain measurement device that creates immersive meditation soundscapes based on the user’s mental activity. This thing was going to turn my brain waves into music.

Created by the Toronto-based company InteraXon, the Muse S is advertised as a “comfy brain sensing headband that helps you understand and track how well you focus, sleep, and recharge so you can refocus during the day and recover each night.” The soft headband is fitted with four electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that measure electrical activity on your scalp. Muse sends this data to a smartphone app that can play guided meditation sessions, track sleep, and award motivational points.

What sets Muse apart from other wearable devices, like the Apple Watch or Fitbit, is that it doesn’t just measure your health—it also guides your thoughts, in real-time, using “soundscapes” of music and nature noises that are supposed to represent your mental state. While you meditate with Muse, the device records your brain data and converts it into ambient sounds, using a proprietary algorithm. You might hear thunder while getting distracted and then hear calm rain when your mind is clearer.

If this seems like a mere novelty to you, consider these numbers: Muse has more than 500,000 users globally, and its parent company InteraXon generates an estimated $13.48 million in annual sales, as reported by the business analytics company Dun & Bradstreet. According to a 2021 press release, InteraXon has saved over 100 million minutes of users’ meditation data, which amounts to one of the largest brain data collections in the world. This puts Muse at the forefront of the “biofeedback” industry, where smart devices generate real-time data for ongoing self-improvement.

When I first learned about Muse, through a targeted advertisement on Twitter, I wanted one. My first thought was that making music with my mind would be extremely cool and fun at parties. It also seemed to be in keeping with other technology that I own: I use a smart scale to record my weight and a smartwatch to measure my heartbeat, so why not a smart headband to track my mental states? As a scholar of religion and science, I was also interested in this strange new hybrid of technology and spirituality. People are using science helmets for daily rituals? Yes, please.

Then, on second thought, I worried that this new wisdom-wearable might portend some dystopia. Will we soon live in a world where consumer tech is constantly measuring our minds, intervening in our thoughts, and harvesting our brain data, all while promising to make us feel better? Has TikTok already made me a consumer cyborg, anyway? Or am I catastrophizing again, due to some underlying anxiety disorder that this thing is ironically supposed to help cure? I was torn.

So when I joined Harvard Divinity School’s Ministry of Ideas podcast last year as a producer, my first pitch was on a story about Muse. (“Let me get one and wear it,” I said, “it will be great tape!”) Along with co-producer Atéha Bailly, I spent the summer diving into the world of Muse, religion, and neuroscience. We listened to the sounds of my brain, interviewed scholars, neuroscientists, and the company’s CEO, and researched the intellectual and racial history of brain measurement. I experienced brief technological immanence followed by a full-blown panic attack. This is that story. (InteraXon sent me a free device for review, but has had no influence in the writing of this article.)

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“The brain communicates electrochemically. We have all these little electrical signals shuffling back and forth, sending electrical and chemical signals to one another. And the sum total of that electrical activity can actually be read on the surface of your head. That’s your brain wave,” said Ariel Garten, the co-founder and “Chief Evangelism Officer” of InteraXon. Garten is many things: an artist, an executive, a TED-talk visionary, and a student of the brain, with graduate training in psychotherapy, neuroscience, and neuro-linguistic programming. When Atéha Bailly and I interviewed Garten last July on Zoom, she moved fluidly between topics ranging from meditation to neuroscience to cyborgs. The segments of our interview transcribed here are lightly edited for clarity.

“Muse has four channels of EEG electrodes: two in your forehead and two behind the ears. It tracks your brain activity during meditation, and it’s able to give you real-time feedback to know when you’re focused and when your mind is wandering,” Garten said. “The problem that most of us have when we sit down to meditate is you sit there [and] there’s no little coach or a little guru sitting inside your brain telling you when you’re ‘doing it.’ With Muse, we’re able to do just that. Track when you’re in focused attention. And when your mind is wandering, then we can translate that brain activity to guiding sounds. So you’re literally able to hear the sound of your mind to hear when you’re focused [or] wandering, and to become cued to come back to your meditative focus. We’re able to track brainwave activity and know when you are in the brain waves associated with focused attention.”

(Image source: foreverfitscience.com)

Electroencephalography dates as far back as the late 1800s. Put very simply, the premise is this: we have sensors that measure electrical activity, and we know brains work with electrical signals, so let’s see what we can learn by measuring the signals coming off of people’s heads. EEG sensors measure voltage fluctuations on the scalp and translate them into waveforms, resembling the squiggly lines you might see on a lie detector test. EEG is still used today in scientific research and clinical medicine, including diagnostic tests for epilepsy. It has even been used to study religion, perhaps most famously in a partnership between the Dalai Lama and MIT.

Yet EEG also has serious limitations and has been eclipsed by other neuroimaging technologies like PET and fMRI. EEG sensors can only measure gross electrical activity from the surface of the skull, so even the best EEG sensors cannot measure the deep interior of the brain like an fMRI can. Among the scientists I know and within the scientific history I’ve studied, EEG has something of a fringe status because it can only make broad measurements and requires much speculative interpretation. Nonetheless, scientists have found correlations between electrical frequencies and mental activity. High-frequency gamma waves are associated with being alert, while low-frequency delta waves are found in people who are in deep sleep.

Garten acknowledges these limitations. “Now with brainwaves,” she said, “you can’t see any details. You can’t see somebody’s thoughts. You can’t see… what’s going on inside, but you can see gross changes in state.”

“We’re able to generate an algorithm that could know when you’re in focused attention and when your mind is wandering. And we did this by looking at first hundreds of meditators, then thousands of meditators, now millions of hours of meditation,” Garten said. “We had to create an audio experience that was going to feel very natural in terms of indicating to you when you’re focused and when your mind is well,” she continued, and “we came up with the metaphor that your mind is like the weather.”

“We created an audio landscape where you can hear your brain as storming when you’ve got lots of thoughts and you can hear it as peaceful and calm when your mind is calm,” Garten explained, “and it became this very intuitive way to understand what your mind was doing. And it doesn’t sound like you’re listening to a soundscape. It actually feels like you’re listening to your own words.”

By turning mental states into sounds, Muse offers to answer the question that every beginning meditator asks themselves at some point: “Am I even doing this right?” What Muse promises, I thought while listening to Garten, is to bring scientific measurement into the once-private place of your inner mind. An anatomy of the soul.

Calibration

“It is Monday, June 14^th, this is Andrew Aghapour, and I’m about to set up this Muse headset for the first time,” I said into my voice recorder, one eye on the sound levels. “The white box looks very much like an Apple product,” I added.

The device inside was surprisingly light. The Muse S consists of a soft headband and a small puck containing the brains of the device, which magnetically attaches to the front. After putting it on I felt like I was wearing a posh headlamp.

I opened the Muse app and initiated my first meditation, choosing the default “Rainforest” soundscape over other options like “Beach,” “Campfire,” and “Ambient Music.” Soon Muse spoke to me through my phone speakers. “Muse will guide you to a deeper understanding of yourself and your meditation practice through powerful real-time feedback,” it said, before instructing me on how to fit the device so that the sensors remained snug against my skull.

Over the coming weeks I would become used to these fittings. Muse has to dial itself in at the beginning of each session. “For this calibration, find a comfortable position and close your eyes,” Muse would say, “Take a deep breath.” After a pause, uplifting synthesizer tones would then kick in and start building. And then, louder, “Muse is now listening to your brain signals. Relax, and let your mind flow naturally.” Like the THX sound effect at movie theaters, it straps you in.

Meditating with Muse’s “EEG-powered” rainforest soundscape begins with the sound of light rain, and an image on your phone of a green leaf getting dripped with water. Beneath that, a head-shaped icon indicates the status of the sensors. As with other guided meditation apps, each session opens with an instructor giving a few tips and directions for the day’s session. That voice recedes, and then there you are, in a forest where the rain is actually your consciousness.

(Image source: Kevin Whipple)

The first thing you notice is how the sounds stop and start. You’ll hear heavy rain, and then all of a sudden the air is silent save for a few drips and a distant bird. “What did I do right?” you ask yourself, microscopically turning your head, and then the storm is back again and it’s time to trial-and-error your way back to serenity. With practice I found that the best way to achieve quiet was to sit perfectly still, breathe normally, and concentrate on not moving. Rapid eye movements always brought thunder, as did moving around. Making my mind race with negative thoughts didn’t seem to change anything, but hyperventilating did. It was fun. (When asked about which brainwave patterns corresponded to which sounds, an InteraXon representative said that this is done using the company’s proprietary algorithms.)

I meditated with Muse daily. I screen-recorded each session and taped audio diaries afterwards. Atéha and I fell into a rhythm trading audio back and forth, interpreting Muse on the fly as we conducted research into the history of EEG and other technologies that have promised to locate religion in the brain. In addition to being a student at Harvard Divinity School, Atéha is also a talented musician, so we were soon speculating on how to isolate Muse’s sounds and turn them into something new. Looking back on our conversations, they remind me of the contagious excitement that Ariel Garten would use to describe her own discovery of brain-computer interface systems while working with Steve Mann, a computer engineer at the University of Toronto. One of InteraXon’s early projects was a “thought-controlled” light show at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

There is something electric about creating a loop between yourself and the world. Most days, it feels like there is an “inside” to me that stands apart from the “outside” world. The two might interact, but they are separate. Today’s philosophers and theorists will tell you that we are, of course, much more porous than that. We are imbricated with the world, our bodies so shot through with history and materiality that it would be senseless to posit some transcendent human subject. To which I would say, “Yes, but it doesn’t feel like that every day, you know?” I have had experiences on drugs, love, and improv where my self dissolved into the world and I could seemingly channel the “outside” through myself without the filter of my own ego, but this mode of being isn’t something I’ve been able to induce instantly for Muse’s retail price of $259.99.

But to meditate with Muse is to encounter your inner-self as a thing out in the world. On day three I opted for the “ambient music” soundscape and found a good groove. I felt something that was quite unlike anything I had experienced before. It was like my inner soul had become my soundtrack. The inside of my mind was outside and then in again. I was a closed loop. My thinking self was silent, and I felt a certain tingle that I have come to call duende—that fleeting experience that one can have, while making art, where rationality breaks down and your gut wrenches with that thrilling truth that all things are possible, including your own annihilation. There’s immanence to be found in these soundscapes, this I can tell you.

Crisis

Day four was when things started to get weird. In my audio diary I spent a lot of time grasping at how meditating with Muse contrasted with the other meditation practices I’ve tried. In mindfulness meditation, for example, I had been taught to focus on the sensations of my breath, return to focus when my mind inevitably got distracted, and take note of where my mind went during those wanderings. It might come as no surprise that cognitive psychologists have found that this form of meditation can improve metacognition.

“Mindfulness is self-analytical,” I said, “but this… is just vibes.” With Muse I found myself listening to music and then trying to change that music, ad infinitem, in a feedback loop that worked best when I turned off the very part of me that meditation helps cultivate. “I need to get over some hang-ups I have about focus,” I said before ending the session early.

My other concern was that I was a rube. “I want it to be real,” I said the next day, “and yet there’s a part of me that feels like a fool saving my progress and being told that I can ‘Give $30 and Get $30’ if I send an invite to a friend.” It seemed like Muse would work best if I could stop resisting and go with the flow, but what kind of flow were we talking about here?

It was time to get some context. Atéha and I needed something to compare Muse to, and we found it in another popular science that measured the surface of the skull: phrenology, the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that took America by storm. Phrenologists infamously believed that a person’s personality and aptitude could be measured on the bumps on their skull, which they believed corresponded to regions for things like humor, selfishness, reasoning, and adaptiveness.

Phrenology was a cultural phenomenon among the American upper-middle class and an important beginning of the modern self-help movement. Everyone from Walt Whitman to Brigham Young to P.T. Barnum sat for readings, their heads measured with calipers while a phrenologist called out values for their various traits and aptitudes. After the reading, the patient would be given a chart of their scores with instructions for how to increase the size of any mental organs that fell short. (Religion, one popular phrenological text argued, could be cultivated by “admiring the divine in nature.”)

But as we now know, those surface measurements had nothing to do with the brains beneath. Phrenologists were infamously wrong. And while its bourgeois patients sat in armchairs, phrenology was simultaneously growing into a brutal science of empire. Atéha and I read James Poskett’s Materials of the Mind and saw how colonial powers across the globe used phrenology to objectify, racialize, and control displaced and enslaved peoples. Scientists in the United States used phrenology to justify slavery and the conquest of Native American lands, claiming that Africans had large “veneration” regions that made them mentally suited for servitude. As historian Kyla Schuller argues in The Biopolitics of Feeling, “impressibility” became a new value: white Europeans considered themselves superior because their brains, they believed, were more plastic.

Muse, too, measures the mind’s surface and promises self-improvement. But maybe phrenology wasn’t the best example. The science behind Muse is more persuasive, its ethics more fine-tuned. I decided to keep going.

On the fifth day I wanted to hear birds again, so I went back to Muse’s default “Rainforest” soundscape. While Muse calibrated, I listened to a voice message from Atéha. “I see Muse as this thing that takes meditation, a practice we associate as religion, and posits that you’ll be a better person, more focused, more in control, more in touch with your own brain states. And they use science to bolster their claims, with a website citing how Gamma frequencies can be observed in high amounts in Buddhist monks,” he said in the grainy recording, “but I think that in doing that, your phone becomes a device that gives you feedback on your religiosity, and… it’s not telling you to be rebellious, it’s telling you to be chill where you are, a good subject in the system. So, our phone becomes a way of enforcing ‘good’ religion.”

“Muse is now listening to your brain waves,” the device said.

Things were stormy from the beginning. As the meditation session began, I started worrying about my own interest in Muse and phrenology. Here I was sitting in the suburbs, fiddling with my brain waves, daydreaming of how I’d impress my friends and improve myself. Was I that different from a phrenology patient, wishing for someone to show me my soul and tell me it is good? At what cost? And why was I so bent on recording my mind and “getting good tape?” I heard thunder and downpour. I tried to refocus and make my mind more receptive, but what I heard was rushing waves. I was getting pulled under. I ripped Muse off my head and threw it down on the couch.

Neuromatic

We needed an expert on this topic, so Atéha and I turned to John Modern, author of the new book Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain. Modern is a professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College and a scholar of American religious history. I knew him from the academic conference circuit, where he has a larger-than-life reputation as a punk rock discipline builder: the tall guy in the vintage suit who’s talking secularism and vinyl records to a packed room at 10 a.m., and why does it smell like weed in here? This is a Marriott.

Atéha and I ordered copies of Neuromatic and scheduled an interview with Modern a month out, then dove into the text. (Atéha would later write a review of Neuromatic for Reading Religion, which can be found here.) What we found was a zig-zagging tale of religion and the brain in American history. Neuromatic is kind of gonzo genealogy of the brain as we know it– that is, our idea of the brain, and our conception of it as an information processor that bridges the inner energies of the mind with the empirical outside world.

Modern argues that, since the Enlightenment, the “explanatory allure of the brain” has made it a “site of interpretive struggle as the politics of secular differentiation took hold. As the quest for the seat of the soul became ever more empirical, the very concept of soul was rearticulated in order to address new, pressing questions about the self and world.” Modern then traces the tangled history of American religion and science to show how this “rearticulation of the soul” has played out across a diverse network of ideas, rituals, concepts, arts, and technologies.

Reading Modern weave between eighteenth-century religious revivals, cybernetics, cognitive theories of religion, “electric love therapy,” the EEG biofeedback movement, Scientology, and more, it struck me that over the last two hundred years, so many sciences and religions have focused on the brain and tried to harness its strange energy. For twentieth-century pharmacologist and biofeedback pioneer Barbara Brown, for example, brain waves reflected a deeper physiology and believed frequencies could be used to improve your brain. Brown thought EEG biofeedback would hasten the development of a “new state of consciousness.” Modern also describes how, within the field of Religious Studies, the cognitive science of religion has gained popularity in part due to its promise to cross the brain-barrier between culture and nature. There’s something electric about that loop, I kept thinking, between self and world.

When Atéha and I interviewed Modern about his book on Zoom, we told him about Muse and our reservations about what happens when religion is collapsed into data on our phones. Modern averred, “Religion is being constantly made up, all the time, and those constructions have real effects in the real world. Those constructions kill people, [they] heal people, they give people solace and a sense of how to understand tragedy… Maybe it’s romantic or humanistic, [but] there’s something being lost if it’s being actively extracted from us and commodified and someone is making money.”

At the same time, though, Modern recognized the appeal of the device. “I have no problem with, you know, having a party on a Friday night with a few drinks and the Muse and seeing what we can do with it, and reflecting and learning from one another.” There was a spark in Modern’s eyes, which came out every time he retrieved items from his collection of brain wave charts and phrenology manuals. This guy loops, I thought.

I told Modern that Neuromatic had helped me make sense of my own struggle with Muse and the uncanny experience of having your brain turned into data. He lit up as he shared his own experience of having his brain measured. “I went up to Boston and was a test subject in this [MRI] experiment where they were studying religion and subjects who have been diagnosed with left-onset Parkinson’s disease,” he said. “I had never had an MRI before. It was an incredibly intense experience because it’s not only the physical intensity—the discipline that you are performing in there to keep yourself still and follow all the rules, and it’s not just the waves of magnetism that I felt sweeping across my body, and not only my tattoo heating up just a little bit…What was spooky about it was I felt 400 years of history being just, like, mainlined into me in that moment…How did I end up here inside the latest, greatest cutting edge scientific instrument that is extracting data from me?”

After the interview was over, I uploaded the audio files and sat on my office floor. My heart was beating fast. Residual nerves. I focused for a moment on my breath. It’s certainly alarming, I thought, that wearables had crossed into the domain, often associated with religion, of ritual self-work. As the history of phrenology and other brain sciences had taught me, knowledge is always imbricated in social power, and so the metrics we use to study ourselves will always bring ideologies and assumptions with them.

But the work of looping is never over. There was audio to edit, a voicemail to transcribe. I wasn’t sure yet what I thought about Muse, but I knew that the best way to find out was to make something and put it out into the world. To see myself as a character. I was, for better or worse, living in the neuromatic.

As I worked on this story over the months that followed, I kept coming back to one piece of tape. At the very end of our interview with Ariel Garten, the InteraXon CEO, I asked if Muse would turn us into cyborgs or become its own religion. Her answer was illuminating, so I will reproduce it here.

Andrew Aghapour: Does Muse make us into cyborgs?

Ariel Garten: We’ve been augmenting ourselves with technology for a very long time. We put glasses on our eyes to sharpen the way that the light goes into them so we can see more effectively… We are constantly enhancing ourselves with technology, becoming a kind of cyborg if it were so in this sense, yes, we’re using a digital mirror to track your mind.

AA: But Muse fascinates me in a way that glasses don’t because it’s… a fold in the universe, like a Mobius strip. [Glasses] bring light that’s far away closer. Muse is taking something that’s behind me and changing it for me to re-experience. So I guess that is where the cyborg question comes in. The future of Muse, to me, seems like the future of a new type of human. How does that strike you?

AG: Yes and no. I’m not sure that I agree, because a mirror does the same thing, reflecting back light. I play the violin. You know, I take these strings [and make] sound that then hits my ear. I then have an emotional reaction, which then changes the music that I create. We are often in feedback loops, in concert with what we’re working with. This [Zoom] setup that we’ve got here, it’s taking information [back and forth] and we’re able to have this two-way discourse. So yes, there’s something inherently beautiful about being able to have a transformative experience. And in this case, the technology adds to a piece of that transformation. But I’m loath to put the weight into the technology and far more interested in putting the weight into the human who is doing the transformation themselves.

AA: Is Muse a religion?

AG: If I use the definition of religion that was in my mind, which is a set of practices or beliefs which help you frame your experience of life, that is also done by a group of other people in a shared experience, would I define Muse as a religion? No, because Muse is just the tool.

AA: So you’re not a prophet, I guess you’re something else? A tool maker?

AG: A shoemaker.

AA: Well if these are shoes, they’re really quite something to traverse the world with.

Andrew Ali Aghapour is a storyteller and scholar of religion and science. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill and is consulting scholar of religion and science at the National Museum of American History. He is the co-author (with Peter Manseau) of Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things. His one-person show Zara is about growing up Muslim in the American South. 

***

 The author would like to thank the Ministry of Ideas team who helped with the reporting of this piece. Zachary Davis and Liya Rechtman shepherded this story with insight and patience. Rachel Carbonara and Michael Schulson were crucial conversation partners. Nick Andersen, Galen Beebe, Maria Devlin, and Shaina Shealy gave sage advice about how to get good tape and tell stories with it. Atéha Bailly co-produced the podcast episode on which this story is based and shaped it at every step along the way. I have tried to do justice here to the work that we did together.

The post My Brain on Muse, the Tech Meditation Headset appeared first on The Revealer.

The prosperity gospel preached at Hillsong, a charismatic megachurch akin to a multinational corporation, promised volunteers blessings on Earth. Hillsong worship enticed attendees to tithe, purchase merchandise, attend conferences, and financially support the church by facilitating the necessary buzz on social media. In 2020, Hillsong had congregations on six continents and claimed an average weekly attendance of 150,000—a global enterprise that required what volunteers repeatedly describe in the docuseries as “free labor.” One former volunteer from the church’s Los Angeles location stated, “protecting the Hillsong empire” was tantamount.

The docuseries admirably attempts to demonstrate what sacrifice by Hillsong volunteers entailed and the toll it took. The strength of Hillsong is its inclusion of testimonies by several survivors of various forms of abuse spanning New Zealand, Australia, and the United States that trace the history of Hillsong’s founding, expansion, and harm. However, viewers are given little insight into how the church’s organization and theology resulted in systemic emotional, spiritual, and sexual abuse wrought by leadership.

The unearthing of scandals since the church’s peak in 2020 have led Hillsong’s empire to crumble. In March 2022, two women accused Brian Houston of inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature while he was on leave from ministry duties to fight a criminal charge of concealing child sexual abuse perpetrated by his late father, Frank Houston. Subsequently, on March 21, Brian Houston resigned from his position as global senior pastor. As a result of these public crises, pastors at many U.S. locations—nine of 16 as of April 2022—are leaving what they call Hillsong’s global family, one that we learn was rotten and dysfunctional at its core.

***

Frank Houston served as the superintendent of the Assemblies of God in New Zealand until the early 1970s. After moving to Australia, he founded a church called the Sydney Christian Life Center in 1978. Houston also engaged in predatory sexual behavior, detailed on camera in Hillsong by survivor Brett Sengstock. Frank Houston sexually abused Sengstock for several years in New Zealand, from the ages of seven to twelve. The allegations against Frank surfaced in 1999 and were promptly covered up by his son. Brian Houston claimed that he stopped his father from preaching, but a recording provided in the docuseries of Frank sermonizing years later proves otherwise. Before his death in 2004, Frank offered Sengstock monetary compensation, a sum of ten thousand dollars, which he notarized on a McDonald’s napkin. When Sengstock called Brian Houston for the money two months later he was told, “you know, it’s your fault all this happened, you tempted my father.” Ultimately, Frank Houston was accused of sexually abusing nine boys.

Hillsong spends a good portion of its third episode detailing the sexual abuse perpetrated by Frank and covered up by Brian, and importantly affords Sengstock valuable time to tell his story in his own words. We catch glimpses of Brian Houston’s 2015 testimony before the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, where he admits that he knew of his father’s crimes. But the docuseries does not describe the organizational systems within the New Zealand Assemblies of God, the Sydney Christian Life Center, the Australian Christian Churches—the Australian branch of the Assemblies of God where Brian Houston was the national president from 1997 to 2007—or Hillsong, that afforded Frank and Brian Houston the authority to cause so much damage as their congregations expanded. The connections between sexual abuse and exploitive labor practices are left unexplored as we learn a brief history of how Brian Houston founded his own church in Sydney and developed his vision for global expansion.

In the docuseries, Tanya Levin, a former Hillsong Sydney member and author of People in Glass Houses: An Insider’s Story of a Life In and Out of Hillsong, describes how Brian Houston’s vision for the Hills Mission Life Center in Sydney—an Assemblies of God church he founded with his wife Bobbie in 1983—changed after he traveled to the United States in 1989. During that trip, Houston met with U.S. megachurch pastors who preached a prosperity gospel to great success. After Houston returned from his tour abroad, Hills Mission Life Center began marketing the church through its worship music by the band Hillsong. In the 1990s, Hillsong started licensing its music to Christian organizations around the world, creating an exponential source of revenue to such success that, by 2001, the church took the band’s name. Kelsey McKinney, a journalist and author of God Spare the Girls, speaks to the impact of Hillsong music on American evangelicalism. Hillsong’s Christian themes and emotional registers would infiltrate other churches, such as hers growing up, because they produced music that shifted with cultural trends. The goal was to stay current. Swells of emotion and momentous chord progressions were orchestrated to make listeners feel something. New songs were introduced live during Sunday services so that corporeal worship and the testing of new music to sell became synonymous. Levin contends, “Music is weaponized for whatever the church’s needs are, which are financial.” An article by McKinney details how the musicians writing and performing under the Hillsong name are exploited, earning little money of their own whenever worship songs are replayed.

(Image source: Spotify)

Rather than making disciples, Hillsong generated consumers for their music, merchandise, conferences, and college. In order to create consumers, the church needed workers to support Houston’s vision for Hillsong, best summarized in his 1993 mission statement: “The Church that I see is a Church of influence. A Church so large in size that the city and nation cannot ignore it. A Church growing so quickly that buildings struggle to contain the increase…I see a people so kingdom-minded that they will count whatever the cost and pay whatever the price to see revival sweep this land.” As Hillsong volunteers describe how they were both inspired and exploited by Houston and the church, connections between varied forms of structural abuse—sexual, spiritual, economic, and emotional—become clearer. Young boys were groomed for sexual abuse by Frank Houston, and church volunteers were groomed for economic abuse by Brian Houston, culminating in traumatic emotional and spiritual abuse.

One of the many church volunteers interviewed on camera is Noemi Uribe, who served at Hillsong Boston. Her testimony is particularly moving, in part because she is seated in a church pew. As she describes what attracted her to Hillsong, Uribe speaks with warmth, “Everybody could wear what they want. There was diversity onstage and among the people in the pews. Hillsong is a safe space for them. I could be whoever I wanted, people didn’t care, this was going to be a place that I could call my home.” Uribe then pauses, bows her head, and tears up, “I need a minute…it hurts to look back because I was so into it, I was so embedded in it, I wanted to believe it. Now that I look back, I’m like damn, they’re trying to manipulate you into receiving and accepting the abuse that they’re causing. It was traumatic and it could have taken my life if I had stayed a minute longer.” Uribe’s story illustrates the emotional, spiritual, and material toll of the “free labor” Houston described as a blessing. But the docuseries does not explore how “diversity” was accepted or represented, other than when volunteers were needed to put on the necessary show to attract attendees and financial support. Although “come as you are” was one of Hillsong’s mottos, adorning signs in the church’s locations, one former volunteer says that the church was not LGBTQ-affirming.

Uribe shares: “[Brian] Houston tends to say little lingos and that’s the lingo for the year. So, there had been the lingo of, ‘Do you believe we get to do this?’ And that became the biggest thing that volunteers would say every Sunday. You’d be exhausted, you’d be tired, people would have panic attacks in the break rooms, and everyone would just look at each other and say, ‘Wow, do you believe we get to do this?’ And it was repeatedly said, and you start to believe it. Now that I look back, damn they’re trying to manipulate you into receiving and accepting the abuse that they’re causing.” Houston’s lingos encouraged as much “free labor” from as many volunteers as the church could enlist in a cycle of alienated labor that became entangled with their relationship to God. The lines between “consent” and “coercion” were strategically blurry.

Uribe describes this tension well: “It hurts to look back, because yeah, I was used. They took someone who was vulnerable, who wanted to just fit in and find a family, who was in a new city, someone who wanted to thrive in this thing that I had been raised in, which was church. And they used that, so that they could get more people through the doors that look like me, and who are going through the same things as me, to get the money out of them, and the seats out of them, and more volunteers out of them. More free labor. And if I were to go back and tell myself that, I probably would disregard what I was telling myself, because I was so into it, I was so embedded in it. I wanted to believe it.”

Through testimonies such as Uribe’s, we glean that Houston’s vision for Hillsong was used to inspire volunteers to exhaust themselves for the sake of church growth at all costs. On camera, we do not hear Uribe expand on the details of what she describes as abuse and the subsequent trauma that resulted. But the language of “family” perpetually used in relation to Hillsong’s global empire along with the refrain of “free labor” often employed by church volunteers, suggests links between sexual, emotional, material, and spiritual harm, even if they are not directly connected in the docuseries. Systems of exploitation saturated all aspects of Hillsong’s ministry. The sexual abuse perpetrated by patriarch Frank Houston remained hidden and unaccounted for by his son Brian, who in turn persuaded volunteers to devote their lives to the church “family” beyond a healthy point. Uncompensated labor on behalf of Hillsong drove volunteers like Uribe to feel not only used but also betrayed. They maintained a veneer of joy and blessing for the sake of the church’s expansion and brand, while they endured work abuses by their “family” behind the scenes of services.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild defines “emotional labor” as “the work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings. Some jobs require a lot of it, some a little of it… Teachers, nursing-home attendants, and child-care workers are examples. The point is that while you may also be doing physical labor and mental labor, you are crucially being hired and monitored for your capacity to manage and produce a feeling.” While “emotional labor” has been broadly applied in ways that Hochschild did not intend, her point is to direct attention to the work of managing one’s own emotions for the sake of a job, such as being a flight attendant, whereby employees are expected to smile and be friendly to customers, even in stressful situations.

Hillsong volunteers, such as greeters welcoming congregants or in various roles on the worship team, provided emotional labor on Sundays; however, this labor was unpaid. They worked on sound, lighting, and music to produce feelings of joy and induce tears of catharsis among attendees expecting a concert-like atmosphere and experience, while they had panic attacks out of sight in the break rooms. A former New York City Hillsong Lighting Director, Brando Kress, stated: “I’d spend the equivalent of a work week at Hillsong for free. At the end it was like, I don’t have the capacity, you guys are going to have to hire a venue guy to run your lighting because it’s just, I’m exhausted and you guys aren’t going to pay me.” The response? “But we don’t want to pay somebody, can’t you train some more people up.” This “free” emotional labor was expected and extracted not only from “willing” volunteers at various church locations, but students at Hillsong’s college in Sydney, where they paid tuition for the privilege of serving.

(Hillsong worship service. Image source: Richard Termine/New York Times)

Hillsong College student Elizabeth Curet describes how a check she sent to the school in Australia to cover her tuition and living expenses was lost, as she moved from her home in the United States to attend. Instead of empathy, she was met with apathy. Curet says that Hillsong, “didn’t want to hold any responsibility for your feelings, your own experiences, because that’s your journey with God.” She was told that “we all go through suffering, persecution, let it go so that you don’t harbor any resentment, any bitterness, be grateful that you’re here,” as she went hungry. Another Hillsong College student, Yolandi Bosch, shares that all attendees were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Many students did not realize that they were signing away their right to talk with family and friends about their curriculum and daily schedules at the school. “When you begin to break down the money aspect of college” says former student Bailey Krawczyk, “that’s when even more of these cult-like tendencies start to show because of the sheer amount of free labor they were extracting from all these kids. You’re required to serve the church at the weekend, you’re required to serve at the college at the chapels, and you’re required to serve at your internship. I was editing their programs for free, as part of my ‘college’ (laughs). Someone’s practicum for the semester would just be cleaning the church. But it was all at the end of the day adding up to free labor.” The non-disclosure agreements supported this exploitation because they could be used against any student who complained.

***

As I watched Hillsong, I could not help but think of my book about the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire portrays the emotional, spiritual, and material price of Driscoll’s vision of church expansion at all costs. There are theological distinctions between Hillsong and Mars Hill—the former is a charismatic church that emphasizes spiritual gifts and God’s blessing, and the latter was a New Calvinist church that emphasized man’s utter depravity and God’s wrath. However, as Hillsong volunteers repeatedly used the language of “free labor” to describe working full-time in different forms of ministry, I had flashbacks to my research. Whereas the atmosphere at Mars Hill was one of fear tinged with hope, the vibe at Hillsong, based on the brief clips of worship offered in the docuseries, is joyful. Reenactment footage shows the jubilant raising of arms and the collective effervesce of dance. Nevertheless, joy is a productive instrument of emotional manipulation, according to Hillsong insiders and pundits. Hillsong and Mars Hill were dependent on volunteers’ willingness to sacrifice jobs with salaries and time with their families in order to serve their church’s mission to conquer territory, accrue cultural capital, and turn a profit. Houston and Driscoll used distinct methods to rally their troops and build their brands, but they shared similar goals.

It is easy to pay too much attention to celebrity pastors when considering a megachurch’s popularity and decline. The docuseries’ biggest weakness is that it devotes too much time to Hillsong’s most famous pastor, Carl Lentz, who led the New York City location from 2003-2020. Lentz’s meteoric rise in fame and the affair that led to his downfall take up half of the first episode and most of the second. It is difficult to get a sense of the style and content of Lentz’s preaching, despite the amount of screentime spent on his story. We see him strutting onstage and hear that “sexual purity” was a common theme during his sermons. During his time at Wave Church in Sydney prior to arriving in New York, Lentz imposed “dating rules” that included no kissing within the first year of courtship and never saying “I love you” before becoming engaged. Jaclyn Hayes, a longtime Wave Church congregant, testifies to a counseling session with Lentz during which she was shamed and forbidden to see her boyfriend after they confessed to having sex once. Haynes married the next man that she had sex with, to avoid another pastoral confrontation.

(Carl Lentz and Justin Bieber. Image source: IMDB)

Lentz hypocritically leveraged sexual purity to exercise control, but his focus was on building his brand. He boasted of celebrity friends on Instagram until he became one himself, attracting social media followers and pop stars in the pews. He was known for his oversized glasses and sex appeal, which has a history among American preachers, particularly Pentecostals, but that history is unexplored in the docuseries. To be sure, there is discussion of neo-Pentecostalism and the prosperity gospel by way of experts with insider and outsider perspectives on Hillsong. Elle Hardy, author of Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World, appears in the docuseries to talk briefly about the history of the movement and doctrine such as the Seven Mountain Mandate, the idea that Christians are to take over the seven mountains or “spheres of influence” in society—education, religion, family, business, government, arts and entertainment, and media. However, the connections between cultural, institutional, and theological problems at Hillsong are implied rather than examined in the docuseries. Instead, there is too much footage of Lentz the Instagram star and adulterous husband, too many flashes of the infamous pic of a shirtless Lentz with chiseled abs and shorts hanging low next to Justin Bieber. Hillsong falls into TMZ-style celebrity gossip journalism when it includes the “gotcha” reveal of Ranin Karim, the five-month long mistress of Lentz, as an interviewee. Karim’s story does little to illuminate the structural problems within the church. The docuseries could have connected distinct yet overlapping harms suffered within the Hillsong “family” by delving into a volunteer’s story of sexual abuse that she endured while working as the Lentz family’s nanny.

Importantly, varied interview material demonstrates the contrast between the experiences of Hillsong congregants who simply attended Sunday sermons and the volunteers who felt that Hillsong was their home and family. Those who idolized Lentz as a celebrity pastor were not hurt in the same way as those who looked to him as their pastor. Dale Smith, a former security team member at Hillsong Connecticut, asks whether Jesus would be given a seat in the VIP section at the front of the stage; he also notes that Lentz never stuck around after his sermons to speak with people. Testimonies to myriad forms of systemic abuse at the hands of Hillsong’s leadership belie the docuseries’ suggestion that the gravest problem plaguing megachurches today is the influence of social media and “mainstream” celebrity culture, as a recent podcast by Christianity Today on the rise and fall of Mars Hill also suggests.

Ben Kirby, who began the Instagram account preachersnsneakers to raise questions about the money spent on pastors’ designer wardrobes, spoke of friendly interactions with Lentz. However, in his last scene on camera, Kirby was visibly upset: “If you believe that people actually have a chance of like, going to hell, and you’re worried about how your ass looks on Instagram, it’s just so obscene.” Kirby begins a repetitive motion on both hands that looks like a nervous tic and calming technique; his thumbs bend the knuckle of his first three fingers in unison. “I don’t know why I’m getting emotional about it. If you believe all this is true, and you’re treating it like a game, that seems pretty foolish. And you’re basically saying you don’t appreciate or respect how grave the stakes are.” The bodily movements of interviewees are at times more telling than their words—the hunching of shoulders, clench of a jaw, welling of tears—speak to experiences of fear, intimidation, and trauma, not apart from but entangled with feelings of joy, hope, and belonging.

Noemi Uribe provides the most fitting conclusion to Hillsong: “My story to them doesn’t matter, because I was another volunteer. I was another person walking through the doors and tomorrow they’re going to have someone else who’s going to be lonely and vulnerable and fall into that trap and it’s going to be a vicious cycle.” So long as churches sacrifice people for the sake of expansion, they cannot hope to be healthy. At a time when the language of “groomer” is weaponized by right-wing pundits and GOP politicians against anyone they consider a political enemy, Hillsong demonstrates that the Christian Right needs to look within if it truly cares about protecting children from sexual predators. Patriarchs of purported “church families” are more likely to be abusers, or guilty of covering up abuse, than those they demonize. Preying on the vulnerable, the docuseries shows, inevitably occurs when ambitions for power matter more than caring for people.

Jessica Johnson is a Visiting Scholar of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. Her ethnographic study of the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle,  Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire, was published by Duke University Press in 2018.

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post Exploitation and Abuse at Hillsong Church appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: A scene from the 1973 film The Exorcist)

About the Catholic Horrors Series: For the past two centuries, Catholicism has played a special role in American horror stories. During that time, the Catholic Church has been complicit in real-life horrors. In this three-part series, three scholars of American Catholicism – Jack Lee Downey, Matthew Cressler, and Kathleen Holscher – consider Catholic horror as a cinematic and literary genre alongside horrors committed by the Catholic Church and its leaders. In so doing, they explore horror as an aesthetic and as a way to analyze and confront the shadow side of Catholicism in North America. Read part one here.

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Warning: What you are about to read is true and involves Catholic clerical sexual abuse.

The priest arrived at night. The mother was surprised to see him there so late. She let him in all the same. A much younger priest met him in the foyer. He spoke in hurried tones about the woman’s daughter. The elder priest stopped him. “I believe we should begin.” The younger frowned. “You mean now? Right away?” “Yes, I think so.” So the mother led them up the stairs. They entered a room where a twelve-year-old girl lay strapped to the bed. The men shut the door. They were alone with her now. They got to work.

So begins the climactic scene in The Exorcist—both William Peter Blatty’s bestselling 1971 novel and William Friedkin’s 1973 cinematic classic. By the time these priests begin the rite of exorcism, audiences have witnessed a mother and daughter’s life fall apart. Regan is a cheerful young girl at the start of the story. She soon finds herself possessed by a demon. Her mother, Chris MacNeil, tries and fails to help her. She brings Regan to psychiatrists and other medical professionals to no avail. With nowhere else to go, Chris turns to the Catholic Church. She urges a young Jesuit priest and psychiatrist, Father Damien Karras, to intervene. Only after he determines that Regan’s situation “meets the conditions set forth in the Ritual” does he consent to an exorcism. Jesuit Father Lankester Merrin, the titular exorcist, arrives at the MacNeil home right in the nick of time to battle the demon and attempt to purge Regan of Evil.

Hence we find two priests alone in a room with a twelve-year-old girl. It makes perfect sense in the story. Absent this context, however, this is the stuff of real-life horror. Variations on this scene have played out hundreds of thousands of times (at least) in countries across the world for the better part of the past century. They still do. When we encounter The Exorcist with full knowledge of Catholic clerical sexual abuse it’s hard not to notice resonances between Catholic horror as a genre and Catholic horrors in history. As Jack Lee Downey notes in the inaugural essay in this series, “public attentiveness to clerical abuse” has sparked a resurgence of Catholic horror “with priest villains counterbalancing The Exorcist-style cosmic superheroes.”

(Image: A scene from The Exorcist)

Nevertheless, hero priests (and their lay Catholic surrogates) remain central to the horror genre today. Catholics, and priests in particular, often seem to be the only characters in horror movies capable of seeing Evil for what it truly is and sending it back to Hell. Reading horror and history together, however, reveals something much more disturbing than any scary movie: it is not a coincidence that thousands of actual priests preyed on and abused victims while crowds packed theaters to watch fictional priests deliver them from the Devil. The very same spiritual power that propels hero priests in horror enabled predator priests to abuse with impunity.

The Hero Priests of Horror

Fathers Merrin and Karras rank first and second on Screenrant’s “10 Most Badass Priests in Horror Movies.” This listicle gives a good survey of hero priests over the years. Of course, horror did not invent the priestly protagonist. As religious studies scholar Anthony Smith illustrates in The Look of Catholics, the middle decades of the twentieth century were a heyday for Catholics in American cinema. Bing Crosby won an Oscar for his performance as Father O’Malley in Going My Way (1944), and was nominated again when he reprised the role in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). But horror established a special role for priests. The Exorcist was crucial in this regard. As film critic Steven D. Greydanus notes in an essay for Decent Films, it provided “a pivotal link from the Catholic-inflected piety of Golden Age Hollywood and the demonic world of latter-day horror.” Priests have been key for the genre ever since, facing down ghosts, demons, vampires, and even the occasional interdimensional entity.

Here’s how the hero priest works in horror. The story inevitably starts with weird things happening—scratching in the walls, knockings at the door, strange smells, pets dying—but our unsuspecting victims assume there must be some reasonable explanation. Rats in the attic, perhaps. Or maybe it’s mental illness. The hero priest arrives to prove, both to the fictional victims and to the audience, that Evil with a capital E is at work. The problem is not your house, he declares, nor is it in your head. Some Thing is here! Skeptics aren’t so easily convinced, and the hero priest must do his due diligence and investigate. When the case is made beyond a shadow of a doubt, he springs into action and deploys an arsenal of Catholic paraphernalia—crucifixes, holy water, rosaries, you name it—to save the day.

(Image: A priest arriving at night to perform an exorcism in The Exorcist)

This narrative arc—from doubt to belief to heroic intervention—contains an argument about the Catholic Church in the modern world. It makes a case for the reality of the supernatural and, in doing so, reinforces the power of the “one true Church” with access to it. In this sense, the hero priest is an instrument against (what is perceived to be) an increasingly disenchanted world and an embodiment of nostalgia for a world populated by angels and demons.

The Exorcist set the template for this trope, but it has played out repeatedly over the past fifty years. The hero priest in Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) openly disdains his clerical contemporaries for whom true “EVIL” has been reduced to the social and political problems of the postmodern world. “The Catholic Church has been forced to reinterpret its whole approach to evil,” Father Callahan laments in the novel. “[B]ombers over Cambodia, the war in Ireland and the Middle East, cop-killings and ghetto riots, the billion smaller evils loosed on the world each day like a plague of gnats.” Callahan yearns to wage war against the real forces of darkness. (His wish will come true by the end, and quite tragically.)

More recently, the Conjuring Universe offers a new iteration of this argument for the clear and present danger of supernatural evil. The massively successful horror franchise is built around the exploits of Ed and Lorraine Warren, a real-life husband-and-wife pair of paranormal detectives (portrayed in the movies by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga). Here the role of “hero priest” is taken up by a lay Catholic couple. The Conjuring (2013) identifies Lorraine as “a gifted clairvoyant” and her husband as “the only non-ordained Demonologist recognized by the Catholic church.” This first film makes the case for supernatural realness in classic based-on-a-true-story fashion, weaving historical photographs into the end credits sequence as “evidence.” The movie ends with an epigraph:

“Diabolical forces are formidable. These forces are eternal, and they exist today. The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as a people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.” – Ed Warren

Whether one follows the devil or God, the film seems to say, they exist and we ignore them at our own peril.

Supernatural horror is appealing for so many because it blurs the boundaries of what is real. (Christina Pasqua explores this dimension of horror in her review of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud.) Once again, The Exorcist set the standard in this regard. Blatty based his novel on the true story of a boy who underwent a ritual exorcism. Friedkin directed the film as if it was a documentary. This is what made it so terrifying. It also appalled many critics. As religious studies scholar Colleen McDannell notes, some critics didn’t know what to do with a film that didn’t use “demonic possession as a metaphor” but instead “was actually about demonic possession.” This reading of The Exorcist as real has been passed on from generation to generation. In her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy, writer Patricia Lockwood recalls her father introducing the film to her like this: “This story is absolutely true, it happened right in St. Louis, and it will one day happen again….This was not a psychological disturbance. This was not puberty. Don’t listen to the shrinks. This was the presence of evil, pure and simple.”

Abuser Priests in History

The premise that propels Catholic horror is that the Church and its clerics are the only forces with the power to go toe to toe with true Evil. That idea runs parallel to the logic that allowed Catholic clerical sex abuse to run rampant: the Church and its priests stand in the place of God on Earth, literally. Reading The Exorcist alongside clerical abuse illuminates these mirror logics. It is, therefore, imperative that we speak concretely. Religious studies scholar Brian Clites argues that this is one way to hold ourselves accountable to survivors: by attending “to the specific dynamics that formed each survivor and each abuser.”

There are tragically countless survivors and abuser priests we could discuss. Since The Exorcist is set in the shadow of Georgetown University and centers Jesuits, we could read it alongside the fourteen priests, most of them Jesuits, associated with the university who have been credibly or plausibly accused of abuse. Or we could discuss the case of David Morrier, the former friar whose abuse of a female student at the Franciscan University of Steubenville included acts termed “exorcism” under Church law. But I’d like to sit with the specificity of what survivors revealed about Father Nicholas V. Cudemo. Terry McKiernan, founder of Bishop-Accountability.org, a website dedicated to documenting the Roman Catholic abuse crisis, introduced me to this abuser priest’s file. I will never forget what I read there. It raises a crucial question for our consideration: what do we do when history reads like a horror story?

(A note to readers: The primary sources linked below come courtesy of Bishop-Accountability.org. Pseudonyms correspond to those assigned in the 2005 Philadelphia grand jury report. Tom Roberts’ and Michael Newall’s reporting on the trial and investigation provides useful context. Those interested in exploring the sources should be warned: some of the details in the files, and in what follows, are graphic.)

Born in 1936, Nicholas Cudemo was ordained as a priest in 1963 by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. His history of reported abuse began in 1964. We know this because an anonymous parishioner wrote a letter informing then-archbishop John Joseph Krol “that one of our young priests, ordained only a few years, has been involved in a love affair.” It seemed an open secret that this thirty-year-old assistant pastor had a sexual relationship with a teenage girl, “a junior at our Lansdale Catholic High School.” He joined the faculty of St. John Neumann High School in 1968 and was transferred to Archbishop Kennedy High School before the school year ended. Around that time a fellow priest instructed Cudemo to be “extremely careful in his behavior with girls” after he witnessed Cudemo “trying to calm an hysterical girl” who “had a ‘crush’ on him.” A month later Cudemo was caught taking a different “young woman to his room for a half hour with the door closed.” Like the unexplained happenings at the start of a horror movie, warning signs were scattered across his first decade of ministry. Like a haunting misattributed to creaky floorboards, abuse was classified as a “love affair” and dismissed as the “crush” of a “hysterical girl.” Signs of what was to come were filed away in an archdiocesan secret archive.

(Image source: Getty Images)

The year The Exorcist opened in theaters Cudemo moved to Cardinal Dougherty Catholic High School, his third school assignment in five years. “Particular friendships” with female students, as archdiocesan officials termed them, motivated these transfers. We know this because of the bravery of the survivors and their supporters who tried to stop him. In 1977, a mother and daughter informed then-Chancellor Francis Statkus that Cudemo was having sex with a high schooler and potentially two of his own nieces. Over the next fifteen years, cardinal archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua would make Cudemo pastor of a parish twice despite no less than four separate reports of sexual misconduct.

The full extent of the horrors Cudemo perpetrated came to light in the fall of 1991 when five women came forward. As summarized by a 2005 grand jury report, between 1964 and 1989 “Father Cudemo raped an 11-year-old girl, molested a fifth grader in the confessional, invoked God to seduce and shame his victims, and maintained sexually abusive relationships simultaneously with several girls from the Catholic school where he was a teacher.”

This is where I want to pause and take a breath, on the edge of the abyss. What these women told archdiocesan officials was deeply upsetting. It was disgusting. It was also frighteningly familiar for anyone who has seen a Catholic horror movie. In The Exorcist, sexual violence is central to the portrayal of Regan MacNeil’s transformation from daughter to disfigured monster. It is ostensibly a demon who harms this girl, yet what audiences witness looks like self-violence. This is precisely what makes it so shocking. The most infamous scene is when a possessed Regan masturbates with a crucifix, shouting “Yes, let Jesus fuck you, fuck you fuck you!”

Much more shocking than this movie clip is how it echoes real-life abuse. Abuser priests, Cudemo among them, drew on their spiritual authority to groom victims and assuage others. They used religious objects in their abuse. They relied on the institutional power of their office to protect them. Cudemo first raped Ruth, one of the survivors who spoke out in 1991, when she was 11 years old. He would hear her confession afterward, insisting that “only after confessing was she ‘worthy of God’s love.’” He invited other priests to rape her. He occasionally incorporated the Eucharist into ritual acts of rape, telling her “she had ‘fucked God’ or ‘fucked Jesus.’” He called her a “walking desecration.” Cudemo abused Ruth from 1971 until 1977.

Cudemo resigned in 1996, but Cardinal Bevilacqua permitted him to minister and say Mass as a retired priest in “good standing.” Cudemo died in 2021. Ruth continues to live with the traumatic consequences of these events today, as do the other survivors of his abuse.

Again, what do we do when history reads like horror? I do not mean this as a euphemism, as a fancy way of saying “something terrible happened.” I mean, quite seriously, what do we do when history mirrors the horror genre’s conventions? William Peter Blatty may not have drawn details from contemporaneous clerical abuse to characterize demonic possession, but even if the connection is not causal that does not mean it’s accidental. Hero priests of horror and abuser priests in history emerge, in part, from a common source: the presumed supernatural power of the priesthood. In the 1973 film, Fathers Merrin and Karras famously command the demon, saying “THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELLS YOU!” In 1970s Philadelphia, Father Cudemo invoked that same power as he coerced and abused a dozen girls (that we know of). The spiritual authority that empowers hero priests on the silver screen is intimately bound up with the religious authority that enabled abuser priests to prey on and violate their victims.

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The public’s awareness of rampant clerical sexual abuse is one reason why horror films are starting to subvert the trope of the hero priest—sometimes deconstructing it altogether. The Conjuring Universe recasts the archetypal priest as a married lay couple and caricatures the Church as a hamstrung bureaucracy. (In the first film, the Vatican “approves” an exorcism only after Ed Warren has already taken matters into his own hands and saved the day.) In the 2021 Netflix series Midnight Mass, it is the priest who brings home a monster that devours his community and, as I’ve written elsewhere, there are scenes that dramatize deference to male clerical authority in terrifying fashion. And there is no priest at all in arguably the most compelling Catholic horror film of the past decade, Saint Maud (2021).

The most effective and affecting takedowns of the hero priest myth, however, are those created by survivors of clerical sex abuse themselves. While the 2021 collaborative documentary Procession is not horror per se, the stories survivors tell draw on its conventions and aesthetics. Here, six survivors—Joe Eldred, Mike Foreman, Ed Gavagan, Dan Laurine, Michael Sandridge, and Tom Viviano—work with director Robert Greene, their lawyer Rebecca Randles, and drama therapist Monica Phinney to produce short films that help them process their abuse and its impact on their lives.

For filmmaker Skip Shea, himself a survivor, the genre serves as an ideal space to confront evils that are often too painful for audiences to engage in other settings. He plays on this powerfully in the 2019 short film Priest Hunter, whose title is rather self-explanatory, as well as in the feature-length 2016 psychological horror film Trinity, in which an artist’s chance encounter with the priest who abused him triggers a surreal, nightmarish journey into his past.

Countering the conclusion to The Exorcist—in which we’re told Regan “doesn’t remember any of it”—these important films compel a confrontation with the real-life horrors wrought by Catholics and their church. They refuse to let us forget.

Visit Bishop-Accountability.org to research the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church.

Matthew J. Cressler is associate professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migrations (NYU Press, 2017) and has written for The Atlantic, Slate, America, Zocalo Public Square, Religion News Service, and The Revealer.

The post Exorcists, Abusers, and When Catholic History is Horror appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Christianity Today)

Construction noise is a constant background in the soundtrack of our American impulse for self-improvement. Lately, however, that sounds less like buildings going up and more like the toppling of statues and the chiseling of buildings that represent our problematic history. At U.C. Berkeley, where I teach writing, many of our buildings have been experiencing an overhaul. Yes, one of the most dangerous earthquake fault lines in California runs right through the middle of campus and some of those buildings are aging, crumbling, and in need of earthquake retrofitting. But a simultaneous building rejuvenation reflects the university’s attempts to correct mistakes of the past. In a scene playing out on campuses around the country, maintenance crews are peeling, grinding, and chiseling the names off of numerous academic buildings.

One of my classes currently meets in the Social Science building, known until last year as Barrows Hall. David Prescott Barrows was an anthropologist who wrote multiple racist screeds against Black and Filipino people. Berkeley’s Building Name Review Committee voted to strip his name from the six-story building that is ironically home to the Ethnic Studies department. Barrows and the others whose names are being removed are long dead, so it is impossible for them to ask for forgiveness. The university, instead, must stand in for individuals.

Institutions are increasingly forced to ask for forgiveness on behalf of people both living and deceased. The process is frequently arduous and clunky, and the results often unsatisfying for living victims or their descendants.

Recently, the American evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today shocked thousands of people by dropping a surprise story in which Christianity Today reporter Daniel Silliman revealed that, for over 12 years, female employees had experienced sexual harassment from former editor-in-chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. According to the current Christianity Today editor-in-chief Timothy Dalrymple, Silliman was invited to write this investigation by the magazine’s editors. At the recommendation of abuse victim and attorney Rachel Denhollander, Christianity Today also hired Guidepost Solutions, a business consulting company, to investigate the abuse claims and make recommendations. Silliman did not see the Guidepost report until after he had concluded his own reporting. The magazine, according to both Silliman’s article and Guidepost Solution’s report, had done little if anything to mitigate the abuse.

The story of how all of this unfolded is highly unusual in journalism. Unlike the Boston Globe reporting on clergy abuse in the Catholic Church, the timing and circumstances of both Christianity Today’s reports surfacing at once is curious. Oftentimes, when an institution reports on its own failings, it is doing a form of public relations to get ahead of and shape the story before an outsider reveals the unvarnished problems.

Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham in the 1950s, has had a large readership, making it a powerful voice for conservative Protestant values around issues of sex and sexuality. It has also been primarily led by men, and, statistically, men are far more likely to sexually harass women than vice versa. The response to Silliman’s report that female staffers were groped and verbally abused was explosive on social media. Even in the post-Trump era, white evangelical culture remains a subject of fascination for many outside of it.

Unlike the Catholic Church, where abuse cases must at least theoretically be reported to central bodies like diocesan offices, evangelical churches have no center of power akin to Rome and there is often no one like a bishop supervising the behavior of pastors. Often, there is little, or no, accountability for pastors beyond their congregations. Unfortunately, according to Silliman’s reporting, that structure — with a powerful man at the top and everyone else below — was replicated at Christianity Today. And powerful men, no matter their religious background, are most concerned with protecting themselves.

In Silliman’s report, most of the harassment cases disclosed to Human Resources were buried or pushed aside, but much of the harassment never even made it to HR. In one disturbing incident, a woman whose sexual harassment was reported to HR by a colleague found herself on the receiving end of a stream of grievances from former editor Mark Gailli, who accused her of seeing “everything” as sexual harassment. Amy Jackson, a former associate publisher who left the magazine in 2018 due to what she described as a “hostile work environment,” told Silliman that “the culture when I was there was to protect the institution at all costs.”

Anyone who remembers Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Doug Phillips, or any other name on the long list of evangelical pastors who were involved in sex scandals knows there is a pattern among powerful evangelicals preachers that often leads to abuse coverups. In addition, the #ChurchToo movement started by evangelical women who were victims of abuse has also made it clear that these patterns of abuse and coverup are more extensive than many people had previously known. The issue at Christianity Today, too, seems to be a consistent pattern of denial that anything was wrong. Guidepost Solutions, the consulting firm hired by Christianity Today, reported that the publication’s “flawed institutional response to harassment allegations could have been influenced, in part, by unconscious sexism,” and that some of the problem may have stemmed from older men “out of touch with current workplace mores.”

For his part, Galli, who retired from Christianity Today in 2019, sounded defensive in an interview with Religion News Service’s Bob Smietama, in which Galli claimed that the stories in Silliman’s report were “taken out of context” or “simply not true.” Galli left evangelicalism behind when he retired from Christianity Today, ironically converting to Catholicism, a denomination with its own history of abuse and denial. Olayowe, on the other hand, was fired by Christianity Today in 2017 after being arrested in a sting operation and pleading guilty to meeting a minor for sex. He did three years in prison and now lives as a registered sex offender.

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When we’re thinking about the idea of forgiveness, the Christianity Today story leads to two overlapping questions: who is really at fault here, and should they be expected to seek forgiveness?  In his editor’s letter that accompanied Silliman’s report, Timothy Dalrymple said the whole process had taken place out of a greater need for transparency. “We owe it to the women involved to say we believe their stories,” Dalrymple wrote, “and we are deeply sorry the ministry failed to create an environment in which they were treated with respect and dignity.” Dalrymple had just come on board as editor-in-chief when some of these accusations began to surface in 2019, and more women continued to come forward in subsequent years. All evidence seems to indicate a series of miscommunications and a problem with the institutional culture of the magazine and of evangelicalism, rather than responsibility residing with a single person. Dalrympe’s apology is straightforward and accompanied by promises for greater accountability. Time will tell how or if that manifests at Christianity Today, but evangelical notions of forgiveness may make maintaining that promised transparency a challenge.

In an interview with Slate’s Molly Olmstead after the report was released, Silliman talked about what forgiveness means for evangelicals like himself. From an evangelical perspective, Silliman says, “there is an idea that in any kind of personal conflict or disagreement or even harm, the ultimate aim for Christians should be the reconciliation of the two parties.” Silliman goes on to say that one of the accused men he reported on seems to believe that “a true Christian should not report stuff if it gets in the way of reconciliation.” Journalists who publish such reports, according to this logic, hamper possibilities for forgiveness and reconciliation.

(Image source: Christianity Today)

That pattern of blaming members of the media for spending too much time reporting on abuse and too little time focusing on stories of reconciliation is not new and not even a particularly evangelical pattern. Back in 2003, now-Archbishop Wilton Gregory, formerly the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that while reporting on abuse was helpful in creating more accountability, “the way the story [of abuse] was so obsessively covered resulted in unnecessary damage to the bishops and the entire Catholic community.” Gregory neglected to consider that many of those reporters were themselves Catholics and perhaps invested in holding an institution they cared about accountable, much like Silliman.

But a reason reporters might not be focusing on stories of reconciliation between abuse victims and church-led institutions is simply because there are not many stories about reconciliation and forgiveness to tell. Over and over, institutions like the Catholic Church, Christianity Today, and universities big and small have apologized for covering up, hiding, and abetting abuse in many forms. Very rarely do abuse victims announce that they have forgiven the institution and are ready to move on. Perhaps that is because the institution has not earned and is not owed any forgiveness.

Christianity Today’s self-investigation was received with varying degrees of emotions on social media. Author Kathy Khang wrote “sadly, I’m not surprised.” Union Seminary professor Isaac Sharp also pointed to institutional failure as a root cause, saying evangelical culture has a “systemic sexual abuse problem that will continue virtually unchecked” while leaders fail to acknowledge “the reality of structural evils.” Pastor and writer Eric Atcheson called it a “huge red flag” that Christianity Today had reported on its own abuse cases, saying this wasn’t a case of transparency so much as an example of “zero meaningful external accountability.” And former Christianity Today managing editor Katelyn Beaty added that she had herself witnessed some of the abuse at the magazine, but as “a young woman in her first job,” she was unclear about what to do to stop it and instead hoped the men in charge – some of them later accused of abuse – would be the ones to do something. She added that while she hoped to see change, she was watching to see if current editors would “rise to the occasion or crouch in defensive protectionism.”

It also didn’t escape the eyes of many on social media that Christianity Today released this report right after it launched a hugely successful podcast called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, an investigation of the evangelical megachurch in Seattle led by Mark Driscoll. Driscoll, who was known to scream and swear during sermons, also had a habit of describing women as sexually submissive in graphic detail. But Mars Hill was so financially successful that people looked the other way until Driscoll irreparably upset his followers by plagiarizing extensive portions of his books.

According to some listeners, however, the podcast pointed fingers at everyone but Driscoll himself, reflecting that same institutional pattern of protecting the powerful. In Religion Dispatches, Jessica Johnson called this “gaslighting at the scale of population” and “a systemic problem for an insatiable evangelical industrial complex.” Mars Hill’s elders and congregation seemed to look the other way when Driscoll shouted abuse at people. But the public exposure of plagiarism, which risked the financial well-being of the church profiting from Driscoll’s book sales, was apparently a bridge too far. If Christianity Today were assessing its own issues of how it handled abuse at the same time it was producing an ethically troubling podcast about another case of abuse, can Christianity Today be trusted? Time will tell.

But institutions rarely follow best practices when they are accused of abuse. When these reports surface, transparency and accountability are paramount. But an apology and promise to do better are not enough to earn an institution forgiveness. Until these things are accompanied by some form of action, whether that’s public accountability, reparations, abusers stepping out of the public eye, or following the principles of restorative justice to prevent future harm, no institution or individual is owed forgiveness.

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When an abusive person’s name is drilled off a building, the shadow of the old name often remains visible even when a new one is mounted on top of it, gouges in the surface that never fully fade away. The same can be said about institutions with histories of abuse. Apologies may be offered, but the shadowy history is now visible to everyone, hiding in plain sight. And abuse being visible to everyone does not mean it deserves to be forgiven. It just means we are able to see it more clearly when it inevitably happens again.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley and writes the Revealer‘s column, “Not So Sorry.”

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Dear Revealer readers,

Last month, the Walton County School District in Florida published a list of 58 newly-banned books from its schools’ libraries. Walton County is but one of countless school districts across the country that is purging books, a trend that made national news earlier this year when a Tennessee school board banned Maus, the graphic novel about a Holocaust survivor. One of the books the Walton County School District banned is a children’s book by Elisabeth Kushner called The Purim Superhero. The story is about a Jewish child who is trying to find a costume for Purim with the help of his two dads. The school board decided  a book with two gay fathers, who – let’s not forget – are Jewish, is unacceptable and must be banned from all school libraries so children in the district never see that book again.

Banning books is but one strategy within a much larger and well-organized movement to make the United States a Christian nationalist state. In addition to attacking democracy through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and baseless lies about American elections, the right is engaged in numerous legislative and judicial moves to refashion America in the image of white, conservative Christians.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I should pause here to acknowledge that some readers may think I have become hyperbolic or alarmist. But I am afraid most of us in the media and the academy have not sounded the alarm loudly enough. For those of us who care about democracy, pluralism, equality, and maintaining a high wall separating church and state, the stakes are incredibly high.

The Walton County School District was emboldened to ban books because of Florida’s recently nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” bill that the governor signed into law this year, making it a crime for educators to discuss queer sexualities and gender identities in lower elementary school grades. If The Purim Superhero had been about a child with straight parents who wanted an outfit for an Easter egg hunt, the book would have remained in the district’s libraries and probably even read aloud in classrooms.

In other states, legislators have turned their attention to transgender adolescents and abortion. Rather than applauding the supportive parents of transgender teens, the Texas governor and attorney general want those parents investigated by Social Services, a move that undoubtedly frightens innumerable trans kids and their families about where they can safely live. Further north in Oklahoma, the governor recently signed a bill into law prohibiting “nonbinary birth certificates,” ensuring that the only legal gender options in the state are male and female. And, the U.S. Supreme Court is now poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Even if the justices do not reverse Roe, state legislatures across the country are making access to safe, legal abortions nearly impossible.

Attacks on the reproductive rights of women and LGBTQ people are nothing new, but we are witnessing a rapid shift where the power of state legislatures, federal and Supreme Court judges, and a well-funded conservative Christian movement is bringing the long-held dreams of white, conservative Christian culture into the mainstream and affecting everyone. And all of this is happening as countless school boards concurrently condemn Critical Race Theory and require educators to teach whitewashed versions of history. We should not dismiss any of these things, from banning children’s books to attacks on how educators teach history, as merely “culture war” issues. They are each carefully planned pieces within a larger strategic framework to make the country reflect a white, conservative Christian vision of American nationhood.

We are not without hope though. There is much people can do to preserve democracy and raise the wall separating church and state. We can organize and vote in high numbers in the 2022 elections. We can support institutions and organizations that are working to prevent and overturn laws that target LGBTQ people, women, and people of color. And, we can educate ourselves about the realities of the Christian right’s power, the roadmap they follow to win local elections that have national consequence, and their ultimate objectives. (If you are looking for a place to start, I find the writing and tweets by Jeff Sharlet, the Revealer’s first editor, especially insightful in this area.)

Part of resisting the turn to Christian nationalism is also staying on top of religion’s place in society. To that end, the Revealer is committed to providing you with well-researched, nuanced, and trustworthy articles that offer you important insights. This issue is no exception and covers an array of topics about religion in today’s world. The May issue opens with the newest installment of Kaya Oakes’ column “Not So Sorry,” where she explores the surfacing of sexual misconduct claims at Christianity Today, a popular evangelical publication, and questions what institutions can do to warrant forgiveness when the systems they have in place allow abuse to run rampant. Next, in part two of our series on Catholic horrors, Matthew Cressler examines reasons for The Exorcist’s popularity alongside credible claims of abusive priests to consider overlapping explanations for the film’s fame and the widespread abuse of children by Catholic clergy. Then, in “Exploitation and Abuse at Hillsong,” Jessica Johnson reviews a new docuseries that showcases multiple forms of abuse that took place within a massive global network of Christian churches.

Our May issue also looks at other pressing issues of religion in the twenty-first century. In “My Brain on Muse,” Andrew Aghapour tests a wearable device that measures brain activity to help people meditate with better focus. He questions if this is a breakthrough source of assistance for meditators or if it foreshadows a dystopic future where tech companies measure everything about us, including our brainwaves. Next, in an excerpt from her book Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, Rima Vesely-Flad shares how Black Buddhists have interpreted Buddhist teachings about the “self” and “non-self” to find psychological liberation in a deeply racist world. And, in “Problems with How Journalists Write about Hindu Death Rituals,” Bhakti Mamtora illustrates how colonial stereotypes of Hinduism persist in the present day by highlighting how mainstream news media covers Hindu funeral rites.

The May issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Black Buddhists and Healing the Traumas of Racism.” Rima Vesely-Flad joins us to discuss why Black Americans have been turning to Buddhist teachings to deal with living in a white supremacist society. We explore how Buddhism has helped Black Americans confront misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, and how Black Buddhists have found a sense of stability despite the presence of profound structural racism. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As the articles and podcast episode in this issue attest, religion is neither solely a source of oppression nor of liberation, neither inherently good nor corrupt. But we must pay careful attention to how certain forms of religion are shaping our society, our laws, and foreclosing possibilities for equality. We are committed to doing just that at the Revealer. And we will continue to sound the alarm about the dangers to democracy and the wall separating church and state until such warnings are no longer necessary.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Banned Books and Rising Christian Nationalism appeared first on The Revealer.